The Last Guardian Was Meant to Have a Short Development Time

The Last Guardian was first announced back in 2009, and work on it began before that in 2007. As the third game from the creator of PS2 hits, Ico and Shadow of the Colossus, a lot of gamers were very excited for the title.

Unfortunately it went through development hell and, by early 2015, many fans were under the impression that the game had been cancelled. However, at E3 2015, Sony opened their show by re-announcing The Last Guardian for the PS4 and showed off a brand new gameplay trailer. After such a long time, it seems The Last Guardian is finally back on track.

Considering its long development cycle it might surprise you to learn that, in an interview with IGN, game director Fumito Ueda revealed that the team had hoped the development period for the game would be fairly short.

“We thought that Ico and Shadow of the Colossus took a long time to develop, so one of the missions of The Last Guardian was that we wanted to create something good in a short period of time, so the fact that it took a long time to develop was completely unexpected for me,” said Ueda

“It would be nice to talk about all the struggles we’ve been through, but there’s a lot of things that we can’t say yet.”

Ueda also went on to reveal that he was initially hesitant to move The Last Guardian from the PS3 to the PS4, as it would add to the game’s development time.

“Now that I look back at it, the PS3 market has become smaller at this point and now I think the PS4 market is the main market so I am happy to have this title as a PS4 exclusive title, but when the decision was first made I had some difficulty and I felt a little disappointed because I wanted to release this game earlier.”

It’s great to see The Last Guardian is back on track. It’s likely we’ll see more of the game at this year’s E3. It will be exclusive to the PlayStation 4 and is expected to be released later this year.